News

January 17, 2025
U.S. electric utilities are making significant investments in advanced grid technologies for planning and operations, as well as supporting information and communication technologies for monitoring, protection and control.One of the most pressing issues today is how to evaluate these potentially large investments to enable reliable, resilient and secure grids in the future, while maintaining...
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January 17, 2025
Berkeley Lab has just released a brief titled A Review of Value of Solar Studies In Theory and In Practice. This brief is a result of technical assistance conducted under the U.S. Department of Energy-funded Resources and Assistance for State Energy Offices and Regulators program. In the brief, Berkeley Lab researchers summarize a collection of state- and utility-commissioned value of solar (VoS)...
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January 17, 2025
The electricity system is in the midst of a significant transformation. What was once a one-directional delivery system using centralized generators delivering electrons to largely passive customers is increasingly becoming a bidirectional network as many customers become both consumers and producers of grid services. Customer preferences for distributed energy resources (DERs), state policies,...
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January 16, 2025
A growing number of states require regulated utilities to file resilience plans to improve the electric grid’s ability to anticipate, withstand, adapt to and recover from increasingly severe weather events (see map). Utility resilience planning is relatively new, and measuring resilience is inherently complex since the focus is on grid performance during low probability, highly variable events.A...
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January 16, 2025
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) has released a new report titled Evaluating GHG Mitigation Potential from ESPC Projects. The analysis draws from LBNL’s eProject Builder (ePB) database, which contains approximately 3,000 energy retrofit projects implemented by energy service companies (ESCOs), mostly energy savings performance contract (ESPC) projects. This report explores the...
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January 16, 2025
Increased adoption of distributed energy resources (DERs), growing quantities of renewable energy on the grid, and load growth from buildings, industry, and data centers are driving the need for increased demand flexibility, and solutions to reliably and cost-effectively balance electricity supply and demand. In order to deploy DERs on a similar scale as conventional supply-side resources,...
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January 15, 2025
We are pleased to announce the release of a new Berkeley Lab technical brief, Electricity Rate Designs for Large Loads: Evolving Practices and Opportunities, describing the design of retail electricity pricing and service agreements for large-load customers, such as data centers. U.S. electricity demand is projected to grow significantly in the next decade, largely driven by data center expansion...
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January 14, 2025
States adopt a wide range of energy-related policies and programs to advance goals such as resilience, economic development, energy affordability, electrifying transportation, grid modernization, and using local resources like hydropower, wind and solar (Figure 1). Image Figure 1. Six Common Areas for State Action on Energy-Related IssuesAlthough clean air is often not a driver, such state actions...
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January 14, 2025
Energy Efficiency Resource Standards (EERS) are a long-standing policy used to advance state goals and priorities, such as reliability, affordability and decarbonization. They ensure cost-effective energy efficiency is used to lower energy consumption, reduce peak demand, and enable grid flexibility. Adapting EERS through strategic design, and integrating EERS into broader energy plans and...
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January 13, 2025
New Berkeley Lab article documents how deployment of new electric generation is being constrained by current interconnection processesThe backlog of proposed power plants that have submitted grid connection requests (i.e., the interconnection queues) is larger than ever. As reported in our flagship Queued Up report, grid connection requests active at the end of 2023 were more than double the total...
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January 10, 2025
But it has complications that must be addressed by regulators, utilities, and community solar providers.As community solar grows nationwide, customers sometimes face a confusing situation – getting a bill from their community solar provider and a separate bill from their utility. Customers have to do their own math to calculate the savings from their subscription.In other cases, utilities and...
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January 9, 2025
About 20 states have adopted requirements for regulated electric utilities to submit public filings that identify planned investments for local grids — the substations, poles and wires, and other equipment that deliver power to homes and businesses. These plans serve a variety of aims, from improving reliability, to integrating distributed solar and storage, to modernizing the grid....
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January 8, 2025
U.S. investor-owned utilities spent an estimated $59.7B on distribution system investments in 2024, accounting for the largest portion of capital expenditures — 32 percent, according to the Edison Electric Institute. While utilities conduct extensive analysis to develop distribution system plans, in most jurisdictions regulators and stakeholders do not know what data are available and how the...
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January 6, 2025
We are pleased to announce the release of a new Berkeley Lab report, Retail Electricity Price and Cost Trends: 2024 Update, summarizing recent trends in retail electricity price levels and price drivers in the United States. National, regional, and state trends are reported for 2019 through 2023 using publicly-available data for: Average retail electricity prices, retail sales, and utility...
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January 3, 2025
In a new report, Berkeley Lab presents a framework (Figure 1) to develop long-term electricity load forecasts that account for the impacts of building and transportation electrification. The framework identifies key modeling decisions and provides examples from recent Berkeley Lab technical assistance to two municipal utilities: Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) and Fort Collins...
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January 2, 2025
Growing demand for electricity in buildings is creating new opportunities and challenges for electric and natural gas planning. To date, electric and gas planning processes have largely been siloed, and only a few jurisdictions have started to examine how these two processes could be linked together.There are many potential benefits of integrating these processes, however, integrating electric and...
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December 23, 2024
Many states are considering ways to incorporate energy equity and justice into electric regulation for a variety of purposes, including to improve affordability. Given the novelty of issues and solutions under consideration, states at all stages could benefit from an awareness of what others are doing. To aid in this information sharing, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has released an update...
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December 12, 2024
We are pleased to release our latest analysis: "A Clean Energy Deployment Baseline for Energy Community and Low-Income Tax Credit Bonuses."The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 introduced, for the first time, place-based federal tax incentives for projects sited in “Energy Communities,” potentially changing the economic calculus of where projects are best sited. Storage projects can qualify for...
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December 10, 2024
Clean energy offers many benefits to consumers, including reducing consumers’ electricity bills, lowering total electricity system costs, and providing health and resilience benefits. States can accelerate consumers' access to these benefits with policies that support energy efficiency, demand flexibility, renewable energy and storage. Berkeley Lab developed a series of briefs that explore the...
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December 4, 2024
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has released the latest edition of its annual report, Residential Solar-Adopter Income and Demographic Trends. The report is based on address-level data for 4.1 million residential households across the country that installed rooftop or other onsite solar through year-end 2023, representing 87% of all U.S. residential PV systems. It describes trends in...
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December 2, 2024
A new guide for electric utilities, states, and stakeholders addresses current challenges for integrated resource plans (IRPs), the roadmaps for meeting forecasted electricity demand.Most states today require regulated electric utilities to file an IRP every 1 to 5 years, and some utilities voluntarily prepare these plans (see map). IRPs historically focus on the bulk power system (including...
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November 26, 2024
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, together with other national energy labs, the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, and the National Association of State Energy Officials, invites state public utility commissions, energy offices, and governor’s offices to attend a webinar to learn more about how and when states can engage in transmission planning and cost allocation...
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November 1, 2024
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is announcing the latest opportunity for state public utility commissions (PUCs) and state energy offices (SEOs) to receive extended duration, high impact technical assistance. The Resources and Assistance for State Energy Offices and Regulators program will begin accepting applications for Deep Dive technical assistance requests on November 1st, 2024 which will...
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October 29, 2024
The Alliance to Save Energy (ASE) conferred an Energy Research and Analysis Star of Energy Efficiency Award to Jared Langevin and Andy Satchwell of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), for their pioneering modeling of building sector decarbonization scenarios.The U.S. Building Sector Decarbonization Scenarios to 2050 detailed, for the first time, the intersection of the building...
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October 23, 2024
Organizers:Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory | https://eta.lbl.govUniversity of California, Berkeley, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics | https://are.berkeley.edu/ Time: Monday, November 4th at 5:00 - 6:00 pm US Pacific timeLanguage: EnglishRegistration: Register in advance for this meeting: https://lbnl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_AUJsipNZRd2VvHaX6nb5Qw. After registering, you...
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